>
It is hard to convey how “sustainable” this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture.I understand your sentiment, but I’m also profoundly unsettled by the idea that commerce and capitalism are reaching beyond the clutches of our planet. Today is definitely a threshold, but what that threshold means, in a broader sense, is not clear to me.
As liberals we celebrate the entrepreneurial slam-dunk and as technologists we admire the elegant engineering.
But maybe I’m jaded, but I fear the profit motive is going too far. We live in a truly extraordinary moment socioeconomically. Never before in the history of mankind had so much activity been predicated upon commercial viability — and never before had so much gone undone simply because it is unprofitable.
Spacefaring nations’ governments have not abdicated spaceflight, and indeed they’re likely to militarise their approach ever more. But now we have private enterprise ferrying people up there too.
“Sustainable”... what a funny word. When have commercial ventures ever been “sustainable”? A sustainable commercial venture tends to be one that externalises most of its costs (look at the sustainability of bulwarks of 20th century commercial ventures, such as the automotive industry and its bedfellow oil & gas).
I will say I’m glad that manned spaceflight is no longer the prerogative of a couple of extraordinarily well-heeled superpowers. But...